This New Rheto rical Continuum Chart for Fiction shows a spectral range between individual (New Critical, structuralist, formalist) approach to group-based (socio-rhetorical) approach to fiction in the 21st Century.

The Stars our Destination is a story of overcoming anxieties and biases from war, as well as other growing up issues in a steel mill town. Over time, the three main characters gradually converge. Two women have nightmares involving the past and the old Prof. Daniel Blei lives off and on in a flood of troubling recollections. The conclusion will…[Read more]

A Robert Brownian Dramatic Dialogue

Part of the Introduction in lieu of an abstract:
Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated novel A Single Man portrays a gay man as an ordinary human being. For its time, the novel’s depiction of homosexuality as a legitimate minoritarian identity, rather than individual pathology, was a radical political gesture. Given this context, literary critics…[Read more]

On the basis of the assumption that poetic response to Edward Said’s Orientalism is
rare, this article seeks to read three post-9/11 American poems on Afghanistan – “The Weavers” and
“Burka Women” by Gerald Wheeler, and “Kabul 2002 (From Dislocations)” by Dr. Bronwyn Winter – as a
significant intellectual departure from the standpoint alle…[Read more]

This essay intervenes in current ecocritical debates about the relationship between fiction and environmental risk by analyzing the limits of risk theory in the deep time of the Anthropocene. Although contemporary ecocriticism argues that we must move from apocalyptic depictions of risk to realistic ones, this essay examines fictions of nuclear…[Read more]

Feminist resistance has been crucial for Argentina’s recovery from the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Alicia Partnoy was “disappeared” into one of hundreds of torture centers sardonically called “Little Schools.” After her release and exile to the United States, she published her poetic testimony, The Little School, with Cleis Press in 1986.…[Read more]

My paper argues for a shift in our theoretical focus on time in narrative dialectics and a post-Barthesian semiotic model for critical interpretations of Latino/a/x border narratives. Currently, we know that border narratives reveal the underlying patterns of literary communicative acts of difference (i.e., oral and literary ambiguity, high…[Read more]

As part of my research, I argue that one important way the definition of a feminist borderland develops in these narratives is from a female character’s knowledge of and interpretation of her physical presence within the borderlands. By applying Linda Martín Alcoff’s theories of gender “positionality” and “self-embodiment” from her text Visible…[Read more]

From the original paper presentation: In this paper I discuss the figurative language used in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks with a particular focus on the figures and symbols associated with food and food practices. This paper performs a textual analysis of figurative language and symbols and the themes of food and food practices to reveal the…[Read more]

From the original abstract file: This paper presentation examines the hermeneutic and epistemological impacts of developing a feminist praxis for researching borderland narratives in the northern Americas. Borderlands in the northern Americas will be discussed as lands that border two countries (one of which is the U.S.), islands that border…[Read more]

This paper discusses the relationships made between ghost figures and their living relatives within Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In this paper I argue that a specific female identity and agency is represented in these texts through figurative language and symbolization of…[Read more]

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) contains six different generic registers. This article is the first to explore computationally the linguistic mechanisms that create these genre effects. Authorship attribution techniques incorrectly cluster the chapters of Cloud Atlas as distinct ‘authors’ using anything above the nineteen most-common words…[Read more]

In a book review of Story of O, part of which appeared on the cover of early paperback editions, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that its publication in 1965 marked “the end of any coherent restrictive application of the concept of pornography to books.” This essay explores the implications of that significant shift in censorship policy for lib…[Read more]

This chapter argues that the sexy librarian stereotype emerged at the end of the twentieth century from the confluence between sexual liberation, free speech movements and print pornography. It focuses on a series of librarian themed pornographic paperbacks published in the 1970s and 1980s by Greenleaf Classics. These stories, although flimsy…[Read more]